roryobryan

Great feature and an easy to remember shortcut, I should have looked on the forums ages ago for this! Perhaps it could be added to the "tips" bar on the bottom of the screen. Thats where I looked to see if it might be possible, then in the view menu, then finally here in the forums.

Would be good to have a "show grid" toolbar button that I could add to my toolbar via the "customise toolbar" option. I often want to toggle the grid on quickly to make a precise adjustment but then switch it off again as it obscures the image a little too much to leave on all the time. It could possibly be added as part of a set along with guides and rulers.

I'm struggling to understand how to use the Marquee tools in Affinity Designers Pixel Persona. The help seems fairly lightweight and I can't find any tutorials or videos. I'm guessing the tools may be based on Adobes versions but I haven't used the Adobe products. Are there any resources to help me understand how to competently use the marquee features of AD. Should I go and look up Adobe tutorials? (The task I am currently working on is mocking up a user interface. I have a screen shot and want to cut out the various buttons and UI elements so I can rearrange them to try new layouts. I can't see a way to accurately draw a rectangle marquee, as there are no handles to adjust the size after you have dragged an initial approximation. I also often end up selecting nothing and end up with empty images. After getting frustrated, I thought I'd better read the manual, but haven't yet found a good tutorial or overview.) Thanks

For simple cropping there is the "Vector Crop Tool". (Not sure if this tool was available when the original question was posted) The vector crop tool shows handles that you can drag to select a part of an image, similar to cropping in iPhoto. You can use the cropped image like this and retain the ability to change the cropping later, or you can select "Layer -> Rasterise" to make the crop permanent.

+1 For snapshots enabled in designer. I've just spent a couple of days in designer testing different concepts for an illustration. Most ideas were iterations on a previous design but not always in a linear direction, so I would try something then back up in the history and try something else. If I didn't save a new document, or a copy of all the objects each time, I would lose the end result of each iteration and they wouldn't all still be available in the history after backing up. Snapshots in photo allow me to save the end result in a snapshot which is great. In photo AFAICT you still lose the history of each iteration when you back up, but at least the end result is available. I guess a more advanced interface might record the complete history of all the branches, but I can see how that would get complicated to present to the user. Although if it could be done well, perhaps with thumbnails rather than just labels, it would be an impressive feature to have. It would also give the user a lot of freedom to experiment if designer saved all the branches of their history.

+1 for gradients that can be perpendicular to a path. I'm currently using gradients to add shadows and highlights to objects to make them look 3d. My next task is to add gradients around the edges of a rounded rectangle, to give the impression it is a cube with rounded over edges. My current plan is to use a quarter of a radial gradient at each corner and linear gradients in between, so it going to be quite fiddly, and not so easy to adjust afterwards. It might be a 1 click task with gradients that are perpendicular to paths. In addition, depending on how it might be implemented it could help with mirrored gradients, e.g. a gradient you might use to draw a cylinder, AFAICT at the moment I need to mirror the gradient manually to get both sides exactly the same.

Thanks Ben. You're doing an incredible job with Affinity Designer, btw.. I've been using it for the last few days and it's very apparent that it's a cut above the rest. The forums, and support also.

** Actually, tried with inside stroke and, YES it did work with my final image.. Originally I had been working with an open path, where I couldn't set an inside stroke, but ultimately closed it and could have used inside stroke and made my life a bit easier! Useful tip thanks. (Just tried starting over using an inside stroke from the start, and I am struggling to get nice rounded corners easily. So I think that ultimately the center stroke is easier in this case to get the desired look, but difficult to scale precisely there after. But a useful tip that is good to know. Thanks for the assistance.

Thanks for quick the reply. My image was actually a little more complex, so the "inside aligned" option wouldn't have worked in this case. Whilst looking around for a solution I did notice that I could "Expand Stroke" to detach the stroke and get closer to what I was after. But that limited my options for adjustments thereafter. Affinity Designer's performance is very impressive, so I can understand why you wouldn't want to compromise a basic calculation like this.

An option for the transform panel to show an objects size including its stroke. -- I've just been creating some graphics in multiple widths; 60px, 120px, 200px wide. The outermost element was a rectangle with a stroke. in order to scale the graphics efficiently via the transform panel I found my self having to use mental arithmetic, and multiple attempts, to account for the stroke width as this is not included in the dimensions shown in the Transform panel. This would be a useful addition as an option for those of us needing precise scaling of stroked objects. Thanks

Can the transform panel show the size of an object including its stroke? Thanks